Lack of Connection isn’t Your Issue

Some founders say they can’t raise money because they’re “not connected to VCs.”

I call B.S.

I’ve spent a huge portion of my 20 year venture career thinking about and acting on capital access.

As an investor, I built an incredibly diverse portfolio of founders—almost 40% founded by women, 25% by founders of color and 6% founded by Black founders. As a community builder, I regularly run the largest mass open office hours matching new founders with venture investors in addition to a ton of open events for first time founders.

I say that not to suggest that I’ve got all the answers or that I’ve solved anything—but I’m in a pretty unique position to see the fundraising process play out for a wide variety of founders, successfully and unsuccessfully.

And while I’m normally one of the only white male investors to call out sexism and racism in the venture world, I’ll also spend an equal amount of time calling out the bad advice being given to underrepresented founders—advice that I believe holds them back and demotivates them before they even get started, and ultimately, perpetuates inequity.

That’s why I think we need to be critical and skeptical about the “lack of connection” drumbeat and examine what it’s doing to the way founders raise.

Warm Intros Only

VCs and other “experts” advise against cold pitches, presenting warm connections as a requirement—one that underrepresented founders or those from atypical startup geographies often can’t meet.

Yet, I know of not a single VC who can say that they’ve never taken a meeting where someone e-mailed them cold.

Do you know who probably e-mails them cold more often?

“Rule breaking” white dudes who have all the unearned confidence in the world. Their thinking is “I don’t need a warm intro. My idea and my team is going to knock their socks off.”

The result is that many underrepresented founders who can’t find their way to a warm intro assume they’re shut out of the process, or, if they do get intros, find that they have to pay for them in some way—often in equity given to accelerators and advisors selling them connections.

It’s the “waiting for an elevator” effect.

If you’re on the ground floor and you see someone standing next to the elevator, seemingly frustrated with how long it’s taking to come down, you’re likely to stand and wait, or give up and take the stairs.

It doesn’t occur to you that this person never pushed the button and that the doors might open for you in short order. And, honestly, if I’m the person waiting, and someone else pushes the button, it’s tempting to think that person is kind of a obnoxious.

“Oh, did you think I was an idiot and don’t know how an elevator works?”

That fear of being obnoxious hamstrings a lot of founders trying to network—and that’s understandable in a world where non-straight/white guys get scrutinized more than others.

You have to get over that—because if you need the connections and don’t have them, you just have to brute force them. You have to risk being pushy, because your competition is getting ahead by doing exactly that.

Network with the confidence of a mediocre straight white guy

Here’s what founders, particularly underrepresented ones or ones out of traditional venture geographies, often get wrong.

They look at their LinkedIn, see they don’t share strong mutuals with Sequoia or Andreessen, and call it a dead end.

Yet, I’ve never heard a straight white guy reference a loose connection and say, “I’m not close enough to that person to ask for an intro through them” or “I’m not sure they’d remember me.”

Do you know how many random white guys come up to me and chat me up as if I have any clue that they pitched me once back when I was at First Round and then saw me again at a startup event six years ago for two seconds—no intro, no reminder, just right into telling me what they’re working on.

Pretty much the same number of people who aren’t in that majority group reintroducing themselves—people who I clearly know and like—assuming they’re not remembered.

Straight white dudes in startup hubs will cold text a guy they played pickup basketball with once 15 years ago to ask them for an intro to Fred Wilson.

By definition, fundraising *requires* building new connections. Very few founders raise money entirely from people they already know. Sure, certain demographics—say, Harvard MBAs—start with more proximity to investors.

But let’s be honest: venture capitalists aren’t hiding in secret rooms. They have websites, newsletters, post on X. They’re searchable. They use LinkedIn.

If you have even basic Googling skills, you can find them and research everything about them. If you can’t, I’ll die on the hill that driving a company to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from people you also don’t know yet is going to be very difficult for you.

Finding VCs is not the problem.

If you can find them but can’t get a meeting, it’s not because you’re “not connected.” It’s because you haven’t given them a compelling reason to take a meeting.

VCs take tons of meetings with founders they don’t know. Cold outreach isn’t some black hole.

The “warm intro” is just a filter—an efficiency hack—to weed out the truly unprepared or unhinged. It’s not a secret handshake that guarantees investment. Most warm intros aren’t even strong endorsements. They’re just someone saying, “This person isn’t a lunatic.”

You know how you can also prove that you’re not a lunatic—active and public engagement within your network and the space you’re working in.

There are tech events every week where investors are on stage, at happy hours, on panels, at demo days. They want to meet smart, ambitious people. If you can’t figure out how to show up, raise your hand, ask a sharp question, or send a short, thoughtful follow-up afterward, that’s not a network problem.

That’s an effective effort problem.

If you tell me, “I don’t have connections,” but you also don’t write online to give people you reach out to a way of judging whether this is going to be a good chat, you don’t attend events, don’t follow startup newsletters, don’t reach out to experts in your field, like successful founders, who are connected to venture, and couldn’t name the top five investors in your space—you’re not unconnected.

You’re hiding.

This isn’t blame—it’s agency. If you’re not connected, you still have tools, tactics, and opportunities to change that.

I’m telling you what actually works, not what’s fair.

Here’s the truth:

A thoughtfully written, personalized note to the right investor from a founder visibly well positioned to work on a big idea will generally get a meeting.

Here’s what’s also true:

Most cold pitch e-mails, however, are not this—and that’s not something most founders are honest with themselves about.

Do VCs back insiders?

Yes—but insiders to problem spaces, not social clubs. If a fintech VC backs someone from Plaid, Chime or even Citibank, it’s because that person has lived the banking problem they’re solving. They have proximity. They’ve done the work to be visibly credible.

That’s what you should be chasing.

I’ll tell you where I do see the biggest issues with those that aren’t closer to the center of the venture-backed tech community—it’s in the knowledge. I wrote about the advantage of having venture backed friends a while back:

“A founder who has a handful of venture-backed friends—successful ones who have raised multiple rounds of capital and who have grown their companies through different stages—has a huge advantage over one that doesn’t. This group of close connections… provides a built-in set of advisors that can be called upon along the way.

You can tell when a founder has a goto set of people in their network to ask all the dumb, remedial questions about hiring, fundraising, deal doing, PR, etc. No one expects a founder to know all of these things at birth, but when you can go to breakfast with a close friend and say, “Explain to me how you ran your fundraising process…” or “Tell me how you successfully hired for marketing” that means they’re going to hit the ground running on every single aspect of growing their company and being a CEO. They just know what the job is supposed to be and what level they need to be performing at because they’ve seen examples of it up close and over time.”

We all know who has these connections—and yes, they are definitively moving faster as founders. So, yes, founders who don’t have this have to do the extra work of building these knowledge networks around them.

It’s an extra lift for sure.

But, not enough founders are asking themselves honestly, “Am I being kept out, or have I not put myself in the center of the action?”

Don’t get me wrong, I know you’ve been working hard. I would argue you’re not doing the right things to build your network, nor are you being honest about the market feedback on your idea, and how much work it probably still needs.

I’ve yet to meet a founder I would objectively say has a pitch in the top 1% of all founders who can’t get meetings with investors. No one likes to be told that their fellow founders are raising the bar higher than where they’re currently operating—that someone else from their group found the investor and got the meeting and impressed that person far more than they did.

That’s what I do in my fundraising feedback sessions.

I’ll tell you why your pitch isn’t landing.

I’m sure it hurts to hear—it did when I had a company that didn’t work out.

Do you know should hurt more?

Having no one respect your potential enough to tell you that you need to be better in order to raise.

Is there bias in the system? Yes, but I don’t need to tell you about that. You knew that already

The world is an unfair place.

Do you want to win anyway?

Start listening to the people who tell you where the bar is and who make you a better founder instead of the people who get paid to sell you access while telling you there’s no other way than through them because of how unfair things are.

In other words, push the elevator button even if there’s someone standing there. The light is actually broken.

Look, I know this will rub some people the wrong way.

Bias exists—I’m not denying that. The venture world is far from fair. But if you’ve read this far, you’re probably not here for sympathy; you’re here for strategy. This is me telling you what actually works, not what should work in a perfect world. You can spend energy being mad at the system or you can spend it figuring out how to beat it.

I’m rooting for the people to choose the latter.